Sheriff’s office joins child predator task force

The Troup County Sheriff’s Office has joined the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a program that helps catch online child predators.

“Internet crimes are on the rise especially involving children,” said Sheriff James Woodruff. “You look at the media everyday and see more and more crimes happening against children.”

ICAC was started in 1998, after a Wyoming police investigator, Flint Waters, found that there were sex offenders and exploitation of children online and he wanted to put an end to it. He then developed a software that could track online predators by identifying computers that were trading child pornography on file-sharing networks.

Today more than 3,000 federal, state and local law enforcement and prosecution agencies, including the LaGrange Police Department, are part of the ICAC Task Force.

“We thought it would be good for us to tackle the problem with the police department,” said Woodruff. “We want to be prepared for anything.”

Woodruff has assigned two experienced investigators, Sgt. Kelly Ellington and Investigator Jason Newsome, to the TCSO ICAC Task Force to assist and work closely with LPD’s ICAC unit.